Canal added to flood/destruction

This Washingon Post article describes one of the main theories as to why the flooding happened in New Orleans. It's a very interesting read and makes some points that seem to have been ignored:

On May 19, Hassan Mashriqui addressed a roomful of emergency planners and warned of a "critical and fundamental flaw" in the coastal defenses for New Orleans. Mashriqui, a computer modeler at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center, singled out the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a 40-year-old shipping canal aimed at the city's gut.

For years, local residents had decried the little-used canal as a "hurricane highway" that would deliver massive storm surges into their neighborhoods.

But in 1998, the St. Bernard Parish Council unanimously called for the channel's closing. In 2002, an LSU study noted that "locally, the MRGO is perceived as a superhighway for storm surge because of the channel's susceptibility to inundation by tropical storms and hurricanes." In 2004, a federally funded simulation drill called Hurricane Pam concluded that surges from a Category 3 hurricane would overwhelm the MRGO "funnel," flood surrounding areas and kill tens of thousands of people.

In recent years, Corps officials have spoken about closing it. But last year, they estimated their "project capability" for dredging the outlet at a whopping $38 million, signaling their desire to keep it open. "The general feeling was: 'There's no way we're closing that,' " says one biologist who left the district this year. "They wanted all the business they could get."

John Paul Woodley Jr., the assistant Army secretary who oversees the Corps, said the Bush administration had to instruct the agency to restart its study of whether to close the channel, because it hadn't taken into account the channel's destruction of wetlands, even though it was conducting a separate study of a $14 billion project to restore Louisiana's coastal wetlands. Woodley said there was also concern that further erosion could merge the channel with Lake Borgne -- which happened after Katrina.

Larry Ingargiola, the head of emergency management in St. Bernard, said he knows exactly why only 52 of its 28,000 structures made it through Katrina unscathed.

"That's where the damn water came -- right up MRGO," he said. "We've been screaming about it for years. I don't know how many politicians I've taken on tours. But there it is."

Maybe now they'll listen and also realize where the blame for the flooding should really go and how long this has been an issue.